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Jesse Rosenthal's Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel is a book about literary form, the trajectory of narrative, the experience of reading, and critical practice. Its central premise is that the ethical preoccupations of the Victorian novel are not a result of the moralizing tendencies that have led to its repudiation by modernist novelists and critics. Rather, the Victorian novel's "moral ideas" are "part of the narrative structure" (4) and therefore a formal property. To make his argument, Rosenthal recovers a tradition of moral intuitionism that has been lost in debates over utilitarianism to show how the former, intuitionism, "is the name that Victorians gave to the experience of anticipated, developing, formal satisfaction" (5). Rosenthal goes further to argue intuitionism not only shapes the Victorian novel, but it is also an implicit characteristic of twentieth-century narrative theory and criticism.
The opening chapter provides moral intuitionism with an intellectual history, traces its legacy in contemporary criticism, and reads Gaskell's Mary Barton and Dickens' Hard Times as novels that illustrate how "narrative method becomes the means by which the novel represents internal intuition" and by extension "make the reader feel the internal, and sensible, existence of morality" (30). Three subsequent chapters focus on suspense in the Newgate novel, humor in David Copperfield, and Bildung as specific "means" that allows form to determine a work's ethical force....